The main goal of the project is to discuss the issue of authorship on the Internet, from the point of view of the credibility of texts as well as from the point of view of the author as the producer of digital textual knowledge. The project is also concerned with the point of view of the receptor, who has in the World Wide Web, an infinity of textual relationships presented from billions of sites placed in the net, but who is yet unable to screen or even to check the credibility of the text, except through comparison to the printed book or through access to sites of institutes or research foundations, specialized journals that keep safe and protected domains with available texts that allow the reader a minimum sense of credibility. On the net, more often than not, the authors, readers and editions can be sheer pastings, altered reproductions, iterations, copies or even preposterous adulterations of the texts. The project intends, through some practical examples, to show how th!
e limits of authorship become ruptured, and not only in the more trivial sense of the rights of the “master” against the “slave” (commercial copyright), but also in the sense that there is no longer a theoretical or even analytical regulation that is capable to support this overwhelming wave that takes over our lives as digital readers.
In order to support this theoretical proposition and to try to ponder a little about it while inserted in the digital universe, I developed a Web site to discuss this theme and to attempt a conceptual appropriation that started from these theoretical conceptions. The site presents a listing of access to various texts by various thinkers, all of them important from the theoretical point of view and who had some impact or representativity in the universe of knowledge production. All the used text databases are from authors whose copyrights have already been extinguished, whereas the names of the authors I use to “sign” the texts come from a very current list, as fortunately there is no law that forbids the use of people’s names for your own purposes. Or would I not be allowed to baptize someone as Gilles Deleuze just because there has been someone with this name before? Besides, all the texts to be accessed by the Web surfer have already been published on the Internet, in random!
addresses that the common net users create everyday. In some classical cases, we have more time to understand the process of comprehension of text in a practical way. What is now presented, from the prospect of having anyone publishing and, as possible, reading what is published, is an increase in the use of texts with no reference and also with no possibility of assembling a line of their “origin”. The users start to quote, when possible, the reference of the Internet site, but it is common knowledge that this site can be removed, modified, altered, diverted and moved.
Basically, from these questions, this project aims at investigating, chasing the tracks of the authors that use the texts, through Internet searches, tracking the uses that the readers made of these agglutinated, forged, iterated and ruptured texts, what acceptance these texts had. How did the users quote? How did they understand it? How did they perceive the content of the writings? It also attempts to observe if in the quotations used from these automatically generated texts (corrupted and hybrid) some reader noted whether the fact that they are signed by someone “known” might have changed the “context” of his/her own text, or if he/she made use of it only because the signature is reported as being by the “author X”?
The project developed a collection from texts “quoted” on the Internet by authors who produced some type of work on the fictional texts generated by the program. The textual works, academic or even literary, present the information that the quoted texts are part of a “project” that was developed with the intention of questioning the “authorship” on the Internet as well as the credibility that the texts published there can be granted. The official warning that is part of all the project pages is as follows: This site is part of the artistic-academic experimental project sign: from text to context. The texts here presented are copyright-cleared and have no link to any type of official disclosure of the authors quoted in the texts and works. The users that wish to quote, copy, alter or even publish under their own names the texts here presented are totally free to do so, based on the purpose of the law.
Official project site:
www.pucsp.br/~cicero/assina/
Sites that are part of this project:
http://personales.ciudad.com.ar/gillesdeleuze
http://personales.ciudad.com.ar/foucault123
* The original in Portuguese “assina: do texto ao contexto” presents a duplicity of ideas, as “assina” is a conjugation of the verb to sign, but is also phonetically equal to “a sina”, the destiny.